On January 25, we will launch a two-week blog radio series on how work policies impact specific communities. That will be followed by a week-long blog carnival (Feb. 6-13) that will flood the public space with articles, opinions and personal stories about what it’s like to work in America today.

In the inaugural show, Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, will interview Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California – Hastings, and Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, about their new report, The Three Faces of Work/Family Conflict: Can Americans Care For Their Families Without Losing Their Jobs? To be released later this month, the report considers the impact of work policies on American workers and families at different income levels, revealing the all-too-common, gut-wrenching choices Americans face between being able to care for loved ones and being able to pay the bills.

On January 29, we’ll focus on Work Policies and Single Women: An Examination of the Work Issues Facing Single Women, With or Without Children. Lisa Matz, AAUW‘s director of public policy and government relations, Melanie Notkin, founder of Savvy Auntie, and Page Gardner, founder of Women’s Voices, Women Vote, join moderator Marcia G. Yerman of the Huffington Post to discuss how the continuum of single women are challenged by work policy issues. Topics will include:

+ The challenges faced by women in the workplace without children (50% of American women)

+ The challenges faced by never married women with children (19%-20%)

+ Reframing the family structure as horizontal (acknowledging that not all family responsibilities are "parental")

+ Legislation to implement change (family and medical leave, Social Security, care giving credits, pay equity, retirement benefits)

+ Is the workload being left to single women without children?

+ Validating single women as heads of their own households

The blog radio series will also be looking at the impact of today’s work environment on men, seniors, businesses, and on the military, LGBT, Latino, and African-American communities. See entire series here.

Please forward this email to friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and anyone else who might be interested. Find out other ways you can get involved, here.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know!

Yesterday, as a prelude to the campaign (to unfold in late January), we held an online chat with a variety of bloggers to get ideas and insights on reframing the work/life conversation. There were actually two chats – one moderated by Pundit Mom Joanne Bamberger, and one by me.

Being the blogger extraordinaire that she is, Joanne published her blog post about the chat just a few hours after the event ended. Me? I digest and write slower. In fact, there was so much to digest that all I can do is try to identify just a very few of things that leaped out at me.

I. It was clear that a major difficulty in figuring out new ways to talk about work, to find fresh language and words that can resonate through dramatically different communities (including but certainly not limited to parenting, caregiving, small business, corporate, global competitiveness, social justice and policymaking) lies in the very diversity of those communities. Early on in the conversation, people threw out words like "flexibility,"  "respect," "compassion,"  "parity,"  "freedom" and "choice," as possible additions to the work lexicon. Later on, however, Maegan Ortiz of Mamita Mala conveyed the harder reality for many, for whom such words would be a luxury. She said, “I think a lot of this is based on class. Lower income workers, undocumented workers all of these things do not exist (flex-time, maternity leave etc),” and later, “We have to be careful about assumptions about who is at the table.”

II. While men clearly have a vested interest in better work policies, the work/life conversation seems to be largely conducted among women. To reach men, we should be using words like “success,” which Shawn Burns of Backpacking Dad said, “still resonates, but it means something completely different to modern workers: more time with family. We don’t necessarily need to invent a new lexicon, we just need to use the words that already have normative content.”

III. Not only HOW we talk about work, but WHAT we talk about clearly needs to change; the focus needs to shift to people and what people need. Parentopia‘s Devra Renner wrote: “’Companies’ are made up of people with families. ‘Employers’ are people with families. Maybe we need to get back to dealing in people instead of treating companies and corporations are human beings. i.e. companies getting ‘right’ to privacy, etc.”

IV. There was a sense that perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about words and messages, and just time to act. Aliza Sherman wrote: “Words are fraught with politics. Every one of us feels differently about the same words. We need to get past the fight over words even though I am often one to be so very specific about words and their meanings. I admit it is a trap – we avoid doing/action when we continually try to massage the vernacular.”

The two chats are still and will remain up and public. You can see Joanne’s chat here, and my chat here. Take a look and let us know what you see in those conversations. We also encourage you to add your own two cents!

So here I am, going about my work and performing my own small part in women’s advocacy, when Maureen Dowd stops me short. I stumble upon, "Men Behaving Madly," and think, Why the hell is she wasting her time on that? I take a look, and yes, it starts off with a few paragraphs about the hit show Mad Men, but the meat of the piece is a defense of David Letterman.

David Letterman!? Even worse than my initial impressions.

There are only a handful of women columnists in this country, and of that select group, only two, Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, have space behind the most prestigious and coveted bully pulpit in American journalism today, the editorial page of the New York Times. Maureen Dowd chose to comment on the sexual scandal of a late-night comedian rather than use her precious column inches to, if not advance women, then at the very least broadcast and illuminate on topics relevant to the great issues of the day.

Well, maybe it’s an anomaly, I think. Perhaps Maureen experienced a singular moment of self-indulgence. So I go to take a quick look at her recent body of work, and end up tracking it back to before the 2008 Elections (I stop at October 15, 2008) before I have to stop myself. I was getting totally sucked in by morbid fascination over her utter lack of interest in and empathy for everyday women.

Over the last year, as far as I could tell (I went through 80 articles fairly quickly), the number of times Dowd has written about anything that would support the women’s policy agenda is a big fat goose egg. The number of times she’s written about anything at all that could be representative of a woman’s perspective on anything substantive can be counted on one hand.

In September, she did devote a column to women’s happiness, inspired by the hubbub around the ridiculous attention Arianna Huffington gave to a recent happiness study and the self-help guru Marcus Buckingham, who was commissioned to cover the topic for the HuffPo. Others have ably explained what’s wrong with that study and Marcus Buckingham here and here. Dowd did little more than accept such studies at face value and echo Huffington and Buckingham.

In contrast to one article explicitly about women, Dowd has written about Sarah Palin eight times (she doesn’t like Palin). She has written about sex scandals three times, showing a fascination with the plight of the political wife, going so far as to produce "Rules of the Wronged," described as a "Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology." One column on Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, and another on Michelle Obama’s sculpted arms reveal her interest in fashion and women’s allure. Beyond these demonstrations of her robust intellect (not), she has written about the Meryl Streep movie, Julie and Julia, driving and cel phones, a visit with George Lucas, and (Good Lord) Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars, among other fluffy things.

Oh, okay. I must grudgingly add that  Dowd did manage to crank out a few items on topics like Dick Cheney, the financial bailout, race, the Internet and the decline of newspapers, but those items were completely gender neutral. In other words, they could have been written by men. The proportion of soft to somewhat serious commentary (although it can be hard to find the line between the two since categorizing is always a subjective art) is distressingly high, and Dowd’s body of commentary itself is distressingly absent of an everyday woman’s viewpoint and concerns. Of the White House Council on Women and Girls, Lily Ledbetter, the murder of Dr. Tiller, or any other event that rocked the world of women, Dowd has not gone near with a ten-foot pole.

The one item that came closest to reflecting what women across the country were feeling on an important issue was "White Man’s Last Stand," about Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. In it, Dowd writes:

President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”

Ironic, huh? Dowd is all for gender diversity on the highest court in the land, but does so very little with her own gender in her own seat on arguably the world’s loftiest media platform. Instead, she has left the responsibility to the one other woman on the editorial page, Gail Collins, but more notably to a dude, Nick Kristof, who has become in many people’s eyes the greatest women’s champion of all. Dowd is a charismatic communicator and has no shortage of intelligence and, I believe, good intentions. It’s such a shame that none of those good intentions are directed at helping her own.

Debra Winger and Whoopi Goldberg made public statements excusing Polanski: 

Debra Winger: “We hope today this latest (arrest) order will be dropped. It is based on a three-decades-old case that is dead but for minor technicalities. We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.”

Whoopi Goldberg: "I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like, ‘You know what, this guy’s going to give me a hundred years in jail. I’m not staying.’ So that’s why he left."

Others attached their names to the Free Polanski petition now circulating among what seems to be the celebrity jet set:

Free Polanski petition signatories:

• Isabelle Adjani

• Monica Bellucci

• Isabelle Huppert

• Diane von Furstenberg

• Tilda Swinton

Are these women so star-struck by Polanski’s artistic genius that they momentarily lost their sense of right and wrong and the fact that they were once vulnerable young girls too? Perhaps they personally know the director, and were so shocked by his dramatic arrest that the sense of solidarity among friends overrode any other instinct. 

These women will find it hard to regain the stature and respect they enjoyed in the women’s community after such a completely counter-intuitive public stance. One possible silver lining could be if, after all the drama dies down, they stepped forward to lend their names to advocacy organizations working to stop violence against women.

Except for the blogger, Penelope Trunk, who incited a storm of controversy when she tweeted:

I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

In a follow-up blog post, Penelope wrote, “70 people unfollowed me, and people actually came to my blog and wrote complaints about the twitter on random, unrelated posts.” Here are a couple of the comments she received:

I think it’s disgusting that you don’t see that your miscarried pregnancy and previous aborted pregnancies were a life. With a heartbeat. That you chose to end.

All you can blog about is abortion, rather disgusting. I day dream about what my daughter is doing, smiling, giggling, cooing or whatever, waiting for daddy, while I am stuck away at work trying to make a living for my family and all you blog about is killing your unexpecting child.

Others criticized her for being callous, for having “a flippant attitude about a serious personal issue.” One young commenter, Gina V., wrote: I thought the post was really self-centered and did not offer much of value to the reader. As a young working female I read this post and was left wondering what it was that I should be taking away from it.”

Well, a flippant attitude about a difficult situation like cancer is often considered brave, so why shouldn’t Penelope be flippant about her own possibly traumatic experience? And what Gina should have taken away from the post is the fact that not all people consider pregnancy sacred.

When I was growing up, a first-generation Chinese-American in the suburbs of New Jersey, I occasionally heard at the dinner table mentions of this young Chinese person or that young person, who had worked so hard and traveled so far to be able to leave China to study in the United States, taking care of an accidental pregnancy through abortion. In college, I accompanied a close friend when she went for her second abortion. She was Chinese-American as well, and going through with the pregnancy was out of the question — her very traditional and strict family would likely have resorted to violence and ended up tossing her into the street. In my world, abortion did not engender soul-searching and worries about the sanctity of life – it was a practical response to an unfortunate situation that could catastrophically alter a person’s life. In the abortion wars, I have been bewildered by a discussion premised on religious views I have no connection with. I, and millions of women like me, both Christian and non-Christian, have been shamed into silence when, by our own religious codes, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

While women’s health advocates have been waging a fierce and public fight to defend a woman’s legal right to have abortion, they have been less energetic, perhaps even neglectful, in protecting everyday women from moral intimidation – the fear of being judged or attacked for abortion views which lead women to keep their thoughts and personal experiences to themselves. In the face of crusading and virulent language (and sometimes violence) against abortion, we have no common rational defense, instead accepting the rancor around us and dealing with our own personal situations on our own, in isolation. We don’t have a common language and sense of solidarity and support to be able to say, "Well, this is what happened to me and how I’m choosing to deal with it," or even "I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion." The result of years of this silence left a vacuum, into which anti-abortion forces injected the possibility of immorality or shame in the public dialog, where before none had existed.

Penelope’s tweet and blog post are dramatic and important demonstrations of an absolute refusal to be intimidated into silence, and to be "wrong." May Penelope’s brave stance be the wedge for new and frank conversations about abortion, so that what is perceived as “immorality” and “callousness” now can be in the future be accepted as just another recounting of a common woman’s dilemma, and her choice of actions respected as stemming from her own personal beliefs, which are guaranteed as basic Constitutional rights. In the great diversity of this country, there are many many people who do not think abortion is unconsionable or shameful. It’s long past time to make that common viewpoint abundantly clear.
 
 
 

There are many women who are working and raising children all by themselves (13.9 million in 2007), other women caring for both children and elderly parents (about 75 percent of eldercare is given by women), and still others taking care of loved ones who are ill or disabled (about 30 million in 2004). There are some women who are dealing with all of these things at once, with pets thrown in for good measure. The recession has furthermore brought home the fact that my very ability to whine about fatigue and agonize about things such as work/family balance, and holding onto dreams, ambitions and identity, is a privilege. However impossibly hectic my days, I have choices, and time and mental energy left over to whine and agonize. Millions of women don’t.

Millions of women care not a whit about impressing their children’s teachers because they don’t have paid leave and can’t afford to take the time off from work to attend parent-teacher meetings. Millions of women don’t torture themselves about how they’re doing professionally relative to their partners because both are working long grueling hours so their family can survive paycheck to paycheck. Millions of women are glad to just hold on to their jobs, never mind worry about “fulfilling their potential.” Millions of women patch together less than adequate childcare, eldercare and other care because that’s the best they can do to allow them to work and provide for their families.

And millions of women, privileged or not, accept caregiving as their own personal burden, and never question why it has to be so hard. It rarely occurs to us – or perhaps we’re just too overwhelmed to realize – that society, originally constructed by men for men, has yet to accommodate women who have taken on so much more responsibility beyond what’s at home. Whether out of necessity or choice, women have assumed much of the economic load from men (making critical contributions to the family coffers in 70 percent of American families) and we need a serious realignment of our social and economic systems to lighten the caregiving load at the other end of the seesaw. This means better policies for healthcare, childcare and employment for an infrastructure that fits women rather than what we have now: millions of us every day trying to jam the square pegs of our lives into the round holes currently on offer.

Women are tired, but let’s be tired of thinking we have to go it alone. Let’s be tired of the lack of support we get from our policy makers and society and of a status quo completely inadequate for our needs. It’s time to stop agonizing and start advocating for ways to help us in our 21st-century dual roles as bread earners and caretakers.

We were less thrilled, however, to see the scanty coverage by the mainstream news media. Perhaps we are naive, but we were hoping for front-page stories. Instead, the New York Times mentions it in its Caucus and Motherlode blogs, while the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal do not report on it AT ALL.

Critics say that the new council is just an executive order and not legislation; that it does not have Cabinet rank; that it’s nothing more than a hollow gesture to make the administration look good. Well, World War II Japanese-American internment camps happened under executive order, and so did the desegregation of public schools. Finessing the Geneva Conventions to allow torture was also by executive order. And while the new council does not have Cabinet rank, the whole Cabinet, from the Secretary of Defense to the US Ambassador to the United Nations, is required to serve on it.

The new council could very well prove to be nothing more than window dressing; it will ultimately depend on the political resolve behind it. But public support strengthens political resolve. If the news media does not think the council significant enough to actually inform the public about it, then the chances for broad-based support diminishes, giving political resolve the chance to fade away. This lack of interest from MSM — about what amounts to a pledge from the President to take the concerns and lives of American women seriously, a pledge that would be of interest to more than half the people in this country — betrays its continuing male bias.

Thank God the women who are watching can take it upon ourselves to let the country know about the council and what it means. It’s up to us to shore up that political will to make sure the White House Council on Women and Girls fulfills its promise.

This Week’s Fem2.0 Twittercast

Topic: Power and Women
Moderator: Madama Ambi
March 15, 2009, 10 PM EST
To join Twittercast, see here.

Madama Ambi writes: "The hardest job is convincing women to take their power. It hurts to say this. Women are ambivalent about power. They don’t know what it is, they don’t know where it comes from, and they’re not sure it’s a good thing to have."

Read the read of Madama Ambi’s conversation starter, here.

March 22 Twittercast: Special Invitation to Younger Women – What Do You Want to Tell Feminism?
March 29 Twittercast: Feminism and Marriage

If you have some ideas about what the Fem2.0 community should tweet about, let us know!

Survey

If you haven’t had a chance yet, you can still complete the Fem2.0 survey here.  The survey closes today.

Have a great weekend.

The Fem2.0 Organizers

While societal attitudes have certainly come a long way in the last 50 years and there are more opportunities than ever for women, gender parity has remained elusive. That’s because we’re still inhabiting a social infrastructure — the thinking and culture and standards of practice that dictate how things are done, especially in venerable old institutions like the government — bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers. Since then, the infrastructure has grown into sprawl and strengthened into sclerosis, its heft allowing only so much adjustment to make room for women, the Feminist Revolution notwithstanding.

Consider American diplomacy. It has a distinctly masculine way of looking at the world, reinforced by the way the State Department, the military and other government services do research, produce reports, hold regular meetings, approach issues, etc., because that’s the way those things have always been done. Without the will to review and revise the way those things "have always been done," there could only be slow and painful evolution, not real change to enfranchise women, no matter how many of us joined those ranks.

According to the White House press release, the Council will "provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families." Initial Council members will comprise the entire Cabinet, including the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, the United States Trade Representative and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Wow.

The Council will be chaired by White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, with White House Office of Public Liaison Director Tina Tchen serving as executive director. Jarrett, of course, is the official Old Friend in the White House, which means she’s got Obama’s ear. Before practicing law in Chicago, Tchen was state vice president of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization for Women and was one of the leaders in writing and lobbying successfully for the Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act. Tchen was apparently so effective a NOW officer that then-President Ellie Smeal begged her to put off law school. "She’s really one of our own," the political director of a major women’s advocacy organization told me.

The Council’s first order of business will be to ask each agency to analyze their current status and ensure that they are focused internally and externally on women. With such a direct, public, and point-blank approach, and the agencies answerable to two no-nonsense women exercising their power straight from the inner circles of the administration, there should be little wiggle room for foot-dragging or obfuscation, though we should expect the usual raft of excuses when we start seeing some results.

During its first year, again from the press release, the Council will also focus on the following areas:

Improving women’s economic security by ensuring that each of the agencies is working to directly improve the economic status of women.

Working with each agency to ensure that the administration evaluates and develops policies that establish a balance between work and family.

Working hand-in-hand with the Vice President, the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women and other government officials to find new ways to prevent violence against women, at home and abroad.

Finally, the critical work of the Council will be to help build healthy families and improve women’s health care.

Again, wow. It’s like a fairy godmother found the feminists’ Christmas list and decided to grant all the big-ticket items.

We did not have the tools to begin dismantling an obsolete government infrastructure, erected by men to serve the ways of men. By establishing the White House Council for Women and Girls, it seems that President Obama has given us those tools. But the Council’s existence does not mean that women can finally relax; we know too well that only we can be our own best advocates. The President has exerted his will from above, and it’s up to women to continue to express our will from below, from the grassroots; there’s lots of ground to cover before the two sides can meet. And since the Internet has freed women’s voices from every cranny of society, we have no excuse to be absent as the Council carries out its work. More than ever, we must use our blogs, discussion lists, Facebook pages Twitter, and every other digital avenue to speak up, comment, challenge, suggest and scold. It’ll be our only guarantee that those tools from the President won’t get rusty with disuse.

Prince William County, Virginia, was cracking down on illegal immigration, giving rise to racist rhetoric and dividing neighborhoods as residents lined up on either side of the issue.

Alanna Almeda’s husband had gained permanent residency in 1996. She didn’t like the implication that it was a mistake to have allowed him to gain legal status, or that “he wasn’t making a contribution or worthy of being here." Katherine M. Gotthardt didn’t like hearing her daughters singing a rhyme they had heard on the playground: "I don’t want to go to Mexico no more. . . . There’s a big, fat guy at the door. . . . If you open it up, he’ll [urinate] on the floor. . . . I don’t want to go to Mexico no more." She didn’t like hearing that immigrant parents were afraid to send their children to school for fear they would be deported.

Alanna, Katherine, Elena Schlossberg and several other stay-at-home moms banded together to battle the county’s hard-line immigration policy. With kids in tow, they began attending board meetings and trying to influence votes.

Things really took off when they took their fight to the blogosphere, starting an "open dialogue" website called Anti-Black Velvet Bruce Li in response to a longer-running anti-immigration conservative blog, Black Velvet Bruce Li. Anti-BVBL has a robust and committed audience, with each post well-commented, and some getting up to 100 comments.

"They’ve gotten engaged, that’s for sure," Black Velvet Bruce Li’s blogger Greg Letiecq said. "They loudly complain about people they don’t agree with. Outside of that, they haven’t presented a positive solution that will help preserve the community." The women say that when emotions on illegal immigration ran hot, they provided a tempered, alternative voice.

In early 2008, the Anti-BVBL moms persuaded moderate supervisors to adjust the county’s immigration policy. Police officers were told they could question criminal suspects about their immigration status only after they have been arrested.

In September, the Anti-BVBL moms rallied residents against the appointment of Robert L. Duecaster, a provocative critic of illegal immigration, to the human-services panel, forcing supervisors to explain their votes publicly.

Today, several of the Anti-BVBL moms are serving on county advisory boards and commissions, and as a group they are diving into other debates on topics that interest them, such as preserving more land in the face of development.
 

I learned about the Anti-BVBL women with great interest, more for what the WashPo article doesn’t say than for what it does. While the Anti-BVBL blog has been very successful, it is by no means the only digital tool the moms are using. Would they be as effective if they didn’t have the convenience of the Internet to do their research on county board members or look up board meeting schedules? And you can bet that they have a heavy dependence on simple email just to communicate and strategize among themselves, as well as to protest board decisions and reach out to potential allies.

What Anti-BVBD’s experience illustrates is passion, commitment, and the simple digital channels already intricately woven into the fabric of our daily lives are enough for any of us to begin to change the world.
 

In the weekly address on Saturday, Obama said the administration will build roads and bridges, upgrade public schools, build out broadband, make public buildings energy efficient and modernize medical record-keeping. As Hirshman points out: “there are almost no women on this road to recovery.”

Here are some other highlights from Hirshman’s piece:

[W]omen constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

A public works program can provide needed economic stimulus and revive America’s concern for public property. The current proposal is simply too narrow. Women represent almost half the work force — not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children’s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.

The article does not include some important contextual statistics: 12.5 percent of American families are headed by women, and according to 2004 data, about 23 percent of American children are being raised by single moms. This means that any jobs program that does not take special care to keep women employed will leave a disproportionately large number of children exposed to economic hardship.

Remarkably, as SusanG at the Daily Kos points out, Obama’s Saturday address was directed at women. When he said, “Will your job or your husband’s job or your daughter’s job be the next one cut?” it was very gender-specific. Since the President-Elect was talking to us, we should not hesitate to talk back: Mr. President-Elect, please take care of the people who take care of everyone else — making sure women have jobs is the surest way to not only shore up the American economy but American families through these trying times.

Obama will not be rolling out the program until he takes office, which means he’s STILL WORKING ON IT. We have the opportunity now to shape the end result by speaking up. Women were outraged by how Hillary Clinton was treated during the primaries, and also by Sarah Palin’s treatment, despite the fact that many of us didn’t even like her. This is much, much more important, because families are at stake — we need policy that takes care of the most number of people, with a particular mind to those who are the most vulnerable and can’t take care of themselves. Women need to get online and start emailing our friends, informing our communities, joining online discussions and just let everyone know how Obama’s proposed public works program is deeply flawed.

Be outraged. The incoming administration will notice.